Marjorie Vogel

Matthew Nistico wrote:

Jay Angler wrote:First off, some things people might not know about "Whole Wheat Flour" - at least here in Canada. Whole wheat flour bought from the store, does not include the wheat germ. This is because the fat in wheat germ goes rancid much faster than the rest of the flour. I store wheat germ in the freezer for this reason.
However, wheat germ has a lot of nutrition - things like magnesium,  phosphorus and Vitamins, which we miss out on if we don't add it back in.
https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/168892/nutrients

To add some of these nutrients back into flour, I take my measuring cup, put 2 Tbsp or more of wheat germ into the cup, then top the rest of the cup up with flour, using the "spoon" method and then levelling it off.

Another solution that I would highly recommend is to make your own whole grain flours out of whole grains!  It requires a bit of an investment (cost me about $300), but it has a lot of advantages.  Storing whole grains at room temperature for years is easy.  People have been doing it for millennia, and it is the principle reason that we adopted so many grains as staple foods - not because of their nutrition or productivity, but because of their ease of storage.  There are a number of brands of home electric grain mills, and even manual mills if you're looking for an arm workout.  I bought myself an electric Mockmill a couple of years ago and love it!  I grind grains into flour in seconds, and I do so within minutes of mixing dough.

You can't get any fresher than that!  And at the rate I use my mill, which is not very often, I fully expect it to last me for many decades.

I love that idea! It's actually eaier for me to get wheat than flour anyway. Just ballpark...what's the volume conversion? How many cups of wheat to make 1c of flour?

What a timely post! I had an idea the other day and have yet to experiment with it.
I've been picking up the sections of an old concrete silo from the farm my husband works at.  I would put five in the back of our SUV when I dropped him off each morning and now have a nice stack that I knew would someday be useful. Each piece is 2' wide and 3 1/2' long. They are corrugated, formed concrete with tongue and groove channels on all sides. They are meant to interlock in a circle, and then be stacked. The silo itself has metal bands every four courses to hold it together. Of course a silo holds all the weight inside. I know I can make round raised garden beds from one course. I'm wondering if I could make this kind of wall for a bed and just secure it by partially burying it?

Paul, you, and what you have built, have been and continue to be, a great resource in my own journey towards resilient living.
Raised in a city in a privileged country, I knew very little practical skills. This forum and your free teaching are my 'go to' source to substantiate the information I need for projects in our off grid life.
However, in learning to live sustainably, the first thing I left behind was the means to purchase most things. I sometimes wonder if I should have taken a different path and played the capitalist game to broaden my audience reach (which is a pitiful reach really, limited to the family and friends who still remain interested). I constantly have people telling me to start a channel, write a book, monetize our homestead or go on TV. I just can't do it, so that leaves me with 'trying'.
I try to live with nature and devise increasingly informed ways to minimize my impact on nature, I inform myself and I contribute to discussions in person and online. I believe we need to try do what we have the capacity to do.

I agree about lazy food...rhubarb is a big one for me and I've been developing an Asparagus patch. While I plant alot of garlic every fall I am also experimenting by allowing some garlic to grow as a perennial.
The laziest I can do is to make space for native volunteers to thrive nearby without me having to go look for them, like mushrooms,primrose, plantain, nettles, dandelions, milkweed, sunchokes, wild raspberries, blueberries, highbush cranberry,  saskatoon berry(or as we call them in  NE Ontario, Canada, Sugar Plums).

Janet Reed wrote:would you take a pic of that Korean grill for me?  And your stove of course...I’d like to see the grill!

My mom was from waaaaaay North Canada...where are you?

I'm on the Montreal River,  NW of Lake Temiskaming. There's certainly farther North than me, but I'm 6 hrs north of Toronto, Ontario.

Pics as requested...and I apologize for the mess...we just harvested goats and I'm in the middle of rendering lard, making stock, boiling water for dishes and of course the requisite pot of coffee is always on!

I couldn't demonstrate the grill, since the stovetop is full, but you see it here in it's two pieces. The ring, catches the cooking fats. It will set in the front hole, right over the flames, when you remove the disc from the stovetop. The grill sets right on top of the ring and has a convex curve to it which guides those fats to the drip ring. I use tongs to carefully remove it when hot and it's worked well.
Another two things I use to make cooking on the surface more manageable, are a pot diffuser for the coffee pot that's always on, and a metal rack that allows me to keep any pot warming without but ing. I've included a pic of them as well.

Congrats on your new stove! I have the same model as you. The Amish share the plans with their counterparts, therefore it's manufactured under a variety of different names, with slightly different finishes, depending where you buy it. Mine is called a Baker's Choice.
We use ours as our sole heat source and to cook in our tiny home. Unfortunately our water reservoir leaked pretty much from day one because it warped, and although we have repaired it a few times, I finally stopped using it altogether because I couldn't stand the lime scale and ash dust in the water. It's really hard to keep it clean when it's always  hot!
I've learned you want to keep smaller sized pieces of wood readily available to quickly adjust the heat and ensure it doesn't longer. My husband would disagree. He likes to throw in a big log, open the ash door, get the cabin as hot as Hades, and cook in his shirtsleeves(which even then is ridiculously hot). It may be because he is a chef and working in a blazing hot kitchen is an everyday occurrence.  Think a little larger than kindling.
Wood type does matter if you have that luxury, with some woods giving more sustained or quicker heat, but since we live in Northern Canada, we are limited to softwoods for the most part. I do find the coniferous give good quick heat that does off quickly as well. For cooking, I do use the ash door as a major tool to get a better draw and quickly get heat. I've also learned that unless you are using the oven too, keeping the flue damper open is just as effective in getting the stovetop hot but has the added be edit of not radiating as much heat from the whole unit.
I've learned that I can bake just about anything after much experimentation. Temps in the oven is more luck than skill, but somehow my baking always turns out.
I do recommend getting some extra firebrick and laying them on the bottom of your oven to encourage heat to stick around. However, setting cookware right in top of those stones doesn't always work when making something like a cake for example. Use the racks to ensure airflow and avoid crispy crusts.
I also purchased a Korean grill from a thrift store (I think it was the 'as seen on tv' brand, to flame BBQ by removing the disc over the firebox and putting the grill in its place. It fits perfectly and as long as you have a good draw, it will not smoke.
I also have a big 7l kettle that is always full on the stove, humidifying the room and making hot water readily available.
All in all, I am four years in with this stove, using it everyday to heat and cook when the temps fall below 15C, and am finally feeling proficient with it. I love it and an always so happy now when it gets cool enough to fire her up. Who knew I would ever be excited for summer to end?

Congrats on your move! You are going in the right direction and it will take time to get there!
It sounds like you have figured out your food so now,
prioritize your heat source. A generator and electric heater will annoy you with noise, eat your funds in gas $$ and I'm sure you didn't intend to pollute so much as a generator will. That should be your last resort for heat.
You have a stove now, so identify and fix the issue. Burning a stove efficiently is a skill and it will take learning and practice. Inefficient burning is dangerous, costly and pollutes more than you likely want.
A taller chimney will create better draft. Make sure you are burning dry wood and your flue is not blocked.  It should be cleaned regularly, and more frequently if your wood isn't seasoned or is wet. Don't try and burn too large a piece of wood unless you have a really good bed of coals. Crack a window  when starting your stove and let it get really hot to start the chimney drafting. Damp your stove down when you've got those coals and logs burning well, this conserving wood and managing the heat.  Let it burn really hot for 10 mins a day to keep the flue cleaner. Empty ash clean-out regularly.
As others have said, consider a rocket mass heater for your future or if your stove is not a high efficient stove, plan to sometime upgrade. Saving wood saves money and reduces polluting emissions.

I would absolutely use your brambles in the compost heap but it would be pretty prickly for cover in your composting toilet. No matter how hard you try you will end up with cover falling out of your scoop before it makes it into the bucket.
I would suggest shredding or chipping them. I have a wood chipper which I admit, is overkill for brambles (I know because we are awash in wild raspberry brambles), but you could get away with using a weedwacker in a metal garbage can as a shredder. It works great.
We've been doing the bucket method of Humanure composting for 4 years. I have evolved my processes sometimes, always going back to Jenkins Humanure book because he really worked it all out with his family's 30 years of practice. Why reinvent the wheel?
My only upgrade I want to somehow make is to include a way to rotate the bucket in the toilet receptacle without it having it be such a hands on process (I'm pondering a lazy susan idea). The reason is, no one but me seems to rotate it and so the biggest contributions to the bucket end up at the back. The bucket becomes 'full' when it's really not. Plus, a male urinating on the pile uncovers that large pile too readily, causing odour and need for extra cover material.

I too have experienced a lack of follow through.
So many have been interested and I've extended the same offer,  come check out our homestead, stay a few days or more in a tent or our trailer in exchange for a few hours help with chores or a project. We are 6 hrs from a major city and 45 mins from a fair sized town.
I detailed exactly what type of homestead we have so there were no shocks, and let them know to bring their own food that they could cook and cleanup after themselves in a tented outdoor kitchen.
I've had 2 take us up on that offer to date (4 years since we first offered). Both couples were, in my opinion, unprepared for this life at their current juncture. I hope they left with an eye opening experience as well as a continued drive to live this way. It's a great life. As for the return, there wasn't much help they could provide given their inexperience.
I've given up offering. It's too much effort. It's sad though because I would have loved the experience myself but also didn't know how to find it.

I'm so sad to always be digging up something everytime I put my shovel in the ground. We are homesteading an 80 acre, former hunt property in the NE Ontario bush, that was unused for about 15 years. Clearly there was no plan for garbage disposal and it feels like previous owners threw garbage wherever they felt. We've turned up an amazing amount of old glass, metal and some plastic in the most unlikely places.

Only once so far have I dug up something of interest. I put my shovel in the ground on our creek bed hillside to plant rhubarb and hit a pickaxe head. A handy tool to have at least.